How to buy a laptop?

Choosing a new laptop is a lot harder than it should be. Every major brand has multiple product lines with overlapping prices and features, and every description is filled with jargon about processors, types of storage, graphics capabilities, screen resolutions and a laundry list of ports and connections. And don’t even get me started on names. Good luck figuring out the meaning behind a Pavilion/Inspiron/XPS/Latitude/Spectre/Envy/ZenBook/Odyssey or any of the others. It’s enough to make you go back to a no. 2 pencil and a composition book.

That’s why we test and review dozens of traditional laptops every year, plus Windows tablets and 2-in-1 hybrids, and even Chromebooks. This handy buying guide will give you the basic background info you need to add context to those reviews and to make a smart purchase. Of course, if you’re looking to just jump right in, I’ve preselected a handful of my favorite current laptops to highlight. If you ran into me on the street, I’d probably steer you towards one of these as a starting point.